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<nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 1)" data-color="red"> I had scarcely dismounted when a shadow fell across the straw-strewn floor of the stable yard. The man who cast it was broad as a barn door, his surcoat the deep russet of dried blood, and a scar ran from his left temple down into a beard the color of iron filings. "You'll be the Ashford boy," he said. It was not a question. "I am Sir Roland of Wexley. I've had three squires before you. One went home to his mother, one broke his collarbone on the tilting yard, and one—" he paused, considering Thunder with the practiced eye of a man who had bought and buried many horses, "—one I do not speak of." I found that my mouth had gone dry. "Frederick, my lord. Frederick Ashford." "Sir Roland will do. I'm no lord, and I've no patience for men who pretend otherwise." He took Thunder's bridle from my hands without asking, and the stallion, who had bitten two grooms and a bishop, went gentle as a lamb. "A good animal. Better than you deserve, I'd wager. Rub him down, feed him, then find the kitchens and eat everything they'll give you." "And then, sir?" Something moved in his face that might, in a kinder man, have been a smile. "Then sleep, boy. Because tomorrow before the cocks crow, I intend to find out whether you're worth the parchment your father's letter was written on." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 2)" data-color="green"> The stables smelled of hay and horse-sweat and old leather, and it was the first thing since leaving home that had smelled like anything I knew. "Steady there. Steady." The voice came from the stall at the far end, warm and unhurried. A man knelt in the dim light with his sleeves rolled past the elbow, running his palm down the foreleg of a grey mare. He did not look up. "Come here, if you've hands. I need someone to hold her head and speak nonsense to her." I came. I held. I spoke nonsense—something about apples, I think, and my grandmother's orchard—and the mare's ears swiveled toward me and stayed there. "Good," the man said. "There. Stone bruise, that's all. She'll be sound in a week." He rose then, wiping his hands on a rag, and I saw the silver spurs at his heels and understood, too late, whom I had been standing beside. "Sir Roland," I said, and made a bow that was mostly stumble. "Don't do that again, it's undignified for both of us." He looked me over the way he had looked over the mare's leg—thoroughly, without unkindness. "Frederick. Yes. Your father wrote that you were clever and stubborn. He didn't mention you were good with horses." "He wouldn't have noticed, sir." "Fathers rarely do." Sir Roland handed me the rag. "Sundown to sunup, this stable is yours to learn. Everything else I'll teach you in daylight. But a knight who cannot mend his own horse is a man walking with a sword he cannot lift." He clapped my shoulder as he passed, and it nearly put me in the straw. "Welcome to Greywater, squire. Try not to be brilliant on your first day. It sets a poor precedent." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 3)" data-color="blue"> I was still brushing the road-dust from Thunder's flank when I realized someone had been watching me for some while. He stood in the archway with the last of the light behind him, so that for a moment he was only a shape—tall, motionless, one hand resting on the stone. When he stepped forward I saw he was younger than I had expected, perhaps thirty, and that his left hand ended at the wrist in a cap of worn leather. "You brush against the grain," he said. "Whoever taught you that meant you no favors." "My uncle's groom, sir." "Then your uncle's groom was a fool, and now you know the first true thing you'll learn here: that most of what you've been taught is wrong, and you will spend years finding out which parts." He came closer, and Thunder tossed his head, and the man let the stallion smell the leather cap without flinching. "Sir Roland. I hold this place for the Earl, such as it is." There was something in how he said such as it is that made me look, properly, at the yard around us: the empty stalls, the gate hanging on one hinge, the well with its rope gone green. "They didn't tell you," Sir Roland said. It was not quite a question, and not quite an accusation. "No. They wouldn't have. Ashford wanted his son knighted, and I am the only knight in three counties who cannot refuse a squire." "Why can you not refuse, sir?" He smiled then, and it was a strange, tired, honest thing. "Because I have need of a second sword hand, Frederick. And because in six weeks something is coming down out of the north, and I would rather not meet it alone." He turned back toward the archway. "Finish with your horse. Then come to the hall, and I will tell you what your father did not." </nc-section>